Equality Federation congratulates Massachusetts on the passage of a proactive, transgender-specific public accommodations bill. This bill updates Massachusetts state law to ensure explicit protections for transgender people from discrimination in public places, including restaurants, hospitals, parks, and public restrooms. We celebrate this powerful victory, which comes after over a decade of public education and dialogue in the state.

This week more than a dozen organizers working to secure non-discrimination protections for LGBT Americans nationwide came together in Atlanta, Georgia, launching a new project dedicated to developing conversations about the importance of comprehensive non-discrimination protections.

Officials in eleven states – Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin – have filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its directive to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

Equality Federation joined the chorus of LGBTQ advocates and health care professionals in praising the Obama Administration for finalizing a rule in the Affordable Care Act that bans discrimination in health insurance and health care.

Federation member PROMO Missouri is celebrating victory as anti-LGBTQ, religious exemption legislation, SJR 39, has failed to make it out of committee rendering it dead.

Equality Federation congratulates South Carolina Equality and all of the hardworking South Carolinians who helped ensure the defeat of S.1203, an anti-transgender bill that would have enshrined discrimination into state law by forcing transgender people to use the bathroom consistent with their biological sex, not their gender identity that they live every day, in all publicly-owned facilities including schools.